Challenge: Existing methods to finetun large language models (LLMs) only update a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetune process.
Approach: They propose quantized side tuing (QST) which quantizes an LLM’s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the original weights.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the memory footprint of the model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations while reducing the memory requirements.

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Challenge: Existing methods to optimize inference and fine-tuning for large language models have failed to improve all aspects of the process.
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Challenge: Quantization-aware PEFT methods have been developed to reduce memory and computational costs associated with large language models.
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Challenge: Existing methods combine quantization with parameter-efficient fine-tuning but fail to meet practical performance requirements.
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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are quantized to lower precision to reduce memory cost and latency in inference.
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Challenge: Quantization studies have focused on instruction-tuned LLMs, leaving their performance on other benchmarks unclear.
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LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Several post-training quantization methods have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits.
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EfficientQAT: Efficient Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a low-bit training solution that requires substantial training resources.
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Challenge: Existing quantization-aware fine-tuning methods decouple weight precision and adapter capacity, overlooking that a layer’s ability to adapt is constrained by the information preserved in its frozen weights.
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Quaff: Quantized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning under Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for quantized fine-tuning fail to address activation outliers . existing methods incur high computational/memory costs or fail to adequately address outlier activation .
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